I have a Rails app with a custom domain and wildcard subdomains hosted on Heroku (Cedar). Let's call it https://mysite.com.
If a user goes to, for instance, https://bobcat.mysite.com, the Rails app is configured to serve only the data relating to bobcat's account.
bobcat.com is registered with a domain-names company - nothing to do with Heroku. I want to change the DNS settings so that bobcat.com redirects to https://bobcat.mysite.com. What CNAME settings do I use? What do I do on my Heroku account.
Forgive this question which could probably be answered by sufficient googling, but I can't get this wrong...
The Heroku docs on custom domains holds all info for you.
It's especially important that you set entries for both bobcat.com and www.bobcat.com, which are in terms of DNS two seperate entries.
For Heroku, the www.bobcat.com is handled by a CNAME to myapp.herokuapp.com(on the cedar stack).
For "Naked domains" such as bobcat.com however no cname can be specified (tue to limitations in the DNS Specifications) so you have two options:
1) Point bobcat.com A-Records to the IP-Adresses specified in the docs above.
OR
2) Redirect bobcat.com to www.bobcat.com using wwwizer's free service. It's as easy as pointing bobcat.com A-Records to 174.129.25.170. I use this approach in a couple of my projects.
So I believe, in the DNS settings for the domain name bobcat.com, you need to create a new CNAME record.
So it would be:
Hostname: bobcat.com
Type: CNAME
Destination CNAME: https://bobcat.mysite.com
Related
I am aware that there have been a few discussions on this one but none have given a definitive answer. I am hoping this will help me and others.
Problem:
I have a domain name (www.xyz.com) registered with 1&1.
I want users to be able to type this in and be shown my website. A Heroku web app.
I want the domain name (www.xyz.com) to be displayed. Not any subdomain url or the heroku app URL.
I do not want the set-up do be anything that will have a detrimental impact on SEO.
Note: I have just got off the phone with 1&1 and they have said that my only options are to do a frame redirect or a http forward. Neither of these meet the above requirements.
Additionally, other posts have suggested finding out what the Heroku IP address is and using this but Heroku recommend against this as they might change it without notice.
Please could I ask that any one kind enough to respond spells things out a little. Anyone having problems with redirects is likely to be new to this.
Thanks.
never used the 1&1 services, but solving your problem is pretty straightforward.
Take the following steps:
Add you domain to heroku. heroku domains:add www.xyz.com . If you have more than 1 app in your heroku account, remember to pass the --app flag
Now you should have something like myherokuapp.herokuapp.com where myherokuapp is the name of your app on heroku
Go to 1&1 and create a CNAME record pointing to myherokuapp.herokuapp.com
I found this video to be helpful - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLVBBAnrrL4
Basically, as noted by #Kevin Lawrence above, you use the 'www' subdomain.
I've never used 1&1 but my DNS provider (dreamhost) does not allow CNAMEs on the main domain name either. It does however allow me to create a CNAME for the www subdomain which was good enough in my case.
I did this:
heroku domains:add www.mydomain.com
create a CNAME record pointing to mydomain.herokuapp.com
Have mydomain.com redirect to www.mydomain.com
It's not exactly what I wanted (or what you want) but it works.
What worked for me was to user Namecheap.com's FreeDNS service that provides free automatic redirect for your TLD and subdomains directly to Heroku, while keeping your domain visible:
example.com and www.example.com now point to exampleapp.herokuapp.com
I had to have a live chat with Namecheap's support to complete the domain verification process, but they answered really fast! Love to namecheap, 1and1 is really crappy, moving my domains away soon. :)
I got this to work properly! No need for CNAME at all. Create a A record in heroku like in this link - creating a custom room domain - provided by heroku (of course, change example.com to your root domain):
heroku domains:add example.com
Here, example.com is the ROOT domain. Once you get an A record, execute the following command
heroku domains:wait example.com
Now verify your domain has been provisioned:
heroku domains -a [your custom heroku app name]
And you get this:
=== [your custom app name] Custom Domains
Domain Name DNS Record Type DNS Target
example.com ALIAS or ANAME elliptical-blueberry-1euo3460fyrtc8zdgulv0f7o.herokudns.com
Next, get the IPv4 IP address of elliptical-blueberry-1euo3460fyrtc8zdgulv0f7o.herokudns.com I got it by using a lookup service.
Updating 1 and 1
Go to 1and1.
Click the DNS tab for your custom domain e.g. example.com
Delete the existing A record
Create a new A record and enter in the # symbol if it asks you, or else I think it is the default AND enter in the IPv4 address
For testing this out, make the TTL 1 min until it's stable
Give it time to propagate. Could be a few minutes to 24 hours.
While I've done this on my VPS, I've never done this for a heroku application, and now I have to do it for a fairly large company so I really want a simple list of bullet-points in how to do this.
I've read these instructions, and I'm still a little bit unclear on what exactly they mean. Again, if I had more time I'd buy some rubbishy domain and test it myself, but I don't have time on my side and need to get this right first time!
Thankfully, no SSL is required at this time.
Here's what I can gather I need to do to point the url www.foobaryfoobs.com at my application, running at warm-chamber-1882.herokuapp.com. Please correct me:
1) I add www.foobaryfoobs.com to the local repository containing the application.
I presume I do this by navigating to the repository on my local machine and running:
$ heroku domains:add www.foobaryfoobs.com
How does this work? Does it update some configuration file somewhere that I need to add to the repository and then push up to heroku?
Are there any caveats or best practices here? What other domains should I add? heroku domains:add *.foobaryfoobs.com, for example?
Heroku advises we use the above wildcard domain here. Why?
2) Log into the registrar that created www.foobaryfoobs.com and navigate to its control panel.
3) Update the domain's CNAME record to point at warm-chamber-1882.herokuapp.com
Am I done for the most part? Now do I just wait?
Is there no IP related stuff?
The domain has several dozen emails attached to it. As long as I don't touch the MX record, I should be fine?
What's a root domain? Why should I add it?
Why should I care that:
Some DNS hosts provide a way to get CNAME-like functionality at the
zone apex using a custom record type.
4) Update the domain's FORWARD / URL record so that foobaryfoobs.com points to www.foobaryfoobs.com
For a nooby, please explain why this is necessary.
3 Conclusive Questions:
1) Is this how it should be set up?:
The app:
warm-chamber-1882.herokuapp.com
Should have the following configurations (saved in some weird config file that I wouldn't mind knowing more about about):
domains:
www.foobaryfoobs.com
*.foobaryfoobs.com
The domain:
www.foobaryfoobs.com
Should have the following records:
CNAME: warm-chamber-1882.herokuapp.com
URL / FORWARD: foobaryfoobs.com target: www.foobaryfoobs.com
MX: *as long as I don't touch them the emails will still work*
2) Am I covered against:
It’s important to make sure your DNS configuration agrees with the
custom domains you’ve added to Heroku. In particular, if you have
configured your DNS for *.example.com to point to
example.herokuapp.com, be sure you also run heroku domains:add
*.example.com. Otherwise, a malicious person could add baddomain.example.com to their Heroku app and receive traffic intended
for your application.
3) How should I adjust the steps for a site that has an SSL backend section?
A.
$ heroku domains:add www.foobaryfoobs.com
How does this work? Does it update some configuration file somewhere that I need to add to the repository and then push up to heroku?
I dont know exactly how does it works internally but this command is equivalent of adding ServerName in apache config file, without this when request comes to www.foobaryfoobs.com it will be forwarded to heroku because of dns but heroku fail to determine your app. You will see the below image.
That's why they need your domain so they know which apps belongs to which domains. They also need it for domain precedence purpose. No changes are required in your code as long as you are okay to allow your user to access Heroku subdomain ie warm-chamber-1882.herokuapp.com. If you dont want user to access heroku subdomain you have to pass 301 http status so it will be redirected to your actual domain i.e www.foobaryfoobs.com . For this you have add this in your application controller
before_action :forward_to_domain_if_heroku_subdomain
private
def forward_to_domain_if_heroku_subdomain
if request.host == 'warm-chamber-1882.herokuapp.com'
redirect_to "http://www.foobaryfoobs.com" , status: 301
end
end
Are there any caveats or best practices here? What other domains should I add? heroku domains:add *.foobaryfoobs.com, for example?
if you ONLY want to use www.foobaryfoobs.com as your domain, this command is suffice ie
heroku domains:add www.foobaryfoobs.com
If you want to assign naked domain foobaryfoobs.com then you ALSO have to run
heroku domains:add foobaryfoobs.com
If you application use subdomains like subdomain.foobaryfoobs.com then you also have to run
heroku domains:add foobaryfoobs.com
2) Log into the registrar that created www.foobaryfoobs.com and navigate to its control panel.
To be precious, you have to do DNS management tool.
3) Update the domain's CNAME record to point at warm-chamber-1882.herokuapp.com
Yes.
Am I done for the most part? Now do I just wait?
Yes, but there are also other things.
Is there no IP related stuff?
Yes, there is no ip related stuff.
The domain has several dozen emails attached to it. As long as I don't touch the MX record, I should be fine?
Yes.
What's a root domain? Why should I add it?
if you want to accept requests from user at warm-chamber-1882.herokuapp.com (not www. warm-chamber-1882.herokuapp.com) then you have to add it.
Why should I care that:
Some DNS hosts provide a way to get CNAME-like functionality at the zone apex using a custom record type.
Yes. They are talking about ALIAS or ANAME type of records. (DNSimple provides it). You have to care it because from that custom-record-type it is easily to add record. They are like pre defined templates eg ALIAS is template of A record.
4) Update the domain's FORWARD / URL record so that foobaryfoobs.com points to www.foobaryfoobs.com
For a nooby, please explain why this is necessary.
It is necessary because www.foobaryfoobs.com and foobaryfoobs.com are different in a same way like images.google.com and news.google differs. www is nothing special it is just a subdomain. If you dont do this, user can't use your site from foobaryfoobs.com but can access www.foobaryfoobs.com.
B.
1) Is this how it should be set up?
Yes, it is correct. But if you want to allow foobaryfoobs.com and www.foobaryfoobs.com, you have to do something like below table. You dont require *.foobaryfoobs.com record if your app doesn't use any subdomain except www. It is bad practice actually to add *.foobaryfoobs.com .
Type | Name | Content
---------------------------------------
ALIAS | foobaryfoobs.com | yoursite.herokuapp.com
CNAME | www.foobaryfoobs.com | yoursite.herokuapp.com
It’s important to make sure your DNS configuration agrees with the custom domains you’ve added to Heroku. In particular, if you have configured your DNS for *.example.com to point to example.herokuapp.com, be sure you also run heroku domains:add *.example.com. Otherwise, a malicious person could add baddomain.example.com to their Heroku app and receive traffic intended for your application.
Yes. Moreover you dont have to worry about this. If the malicious user can set subdomain at your domain then he capable to do much destruction :P. Actually, malicious user can't access your DNS management tool so you're safe.
In your registrars host records you want to set the # to the redirect to the www.foobaryfoobs.com and the www record to the CNAME of warm-chamber-1882.herokuapp.com, this is because Heroku may change the IP address associated with that hostname and if you have the ip in your registrar you would also have to update. Using a CNAME ties that url to the ip so when Heroku updates the ip your site is still up. As long as you don't touch your MX records your email will be fine.
To protect again *.foobaryfoobs.com issues they warn about you can also setup a host record for exactly that and make it a CNAME as well pointing at warm-chamber-1882.herokuapp.com.
As far as setting up the SSL you can look at this article, that should get you setup.
I can answer only some of this:
1) a) It updates some config stored on heroku's end related to your app. You can see that if you login to the heroku site and look at the config for your app.
b) dunno
c) this will let people type both "http://www.foobaryfoobs.com" and "http://foobaryfoobs.com" and for both of them to go to your app.
You can also do this with an A/AAAA record.. in my opinion the better way.
Check out my answer in this thread
Heroku EU region how to setup custom domain name?
I have my domain name example.com from domain registrar BigRock, which also provides me the DNS management panel.
My application is hosted at Heroku at example.herokuapp.com.
Domain Settings at Heroku:
bash-3.2$ heroku domains
=== MyApp Domain Names
*.example.com
example.herokuapp.com
example.com
www.example.com
In my DNS Management panel, I have 0 A records, 1 MX records for Hotmail and 1 CNAME record for www.example.com.
I know about the problem with Naked domains and A-records with Heroku.
I have gone through these:
1. StackOverflow ques - How to setup DNS for an apex domain (no www) pointing to a Heroku app?
2. Heroku DevCenter - Custom domains - set up root domain
3. Heroku DevCenter - Apex Domains
The above links and many others point towards 2 solutions:
Using ALIAS or ANAME records by DNSimple/ DNS Made Easy
If your DNS provider does not support such a record-type, and you are unable to switch to one that does, you will need to use subdomain redirection to send root domain requests to your app on Heroku.
Since, I couldn't find such records on BigRock DNS Management Console. There were only these records - "A, AAAA, MX, CNAME, TXT, SRV and SOA".
Accordingly, I have setup "Domain Forwarding" for my domain. But, it only gave me option to provide "Designation URL where you wish to forward requests for www.example.com and example.com".
Now, If I do
bash-3.2$ host example.com
example.com has address 173.194.16.11
example.com mail is handled by 15 888379351a9a.pamx1.hotmail.com.
and
bash-3.2$ host www.example.com
www.example.com is an alias for example.herokuapp.com.
This does solve the naked domain problem. But other subdomains like xyz.example.com are still not redirected to www.example.com, because
there is no mention to redirect all subdomains i.e "*" to any other designation in the "Domain Forwarding" section on BigRock DNS provider.
So, my question is how can I solve this problem of redirecting sub-domains?
Another Query Related to SSL -
Here in the Heroku Devcenter - subdomain redirection, it says that
"However, be aware that, using this method, a secure request to the root domain, e.g., https://example.com, will result in an error or warning being displayed to the user."
Is there any way of fixing the above issue, or do I have to switch to DNSimple or DNS Made Easy to use the ALIAS or ANAME records services they provide?
UPDATE:
On further digging, I found this SO ques - Rails Manually redirecting from Naked Domain, which suggests using:
Rack_rewrite
Refraction gem
Is this a better way?
Once you setup a domain forward in BigRock DNS panel, you will see two A records like example.com => 173.193.106.11 and www.example.com => 173.193.106.11. The same way if you create wildcard dns A record, it will redirect for all the domains. i.e *.example.com => 173.193.106.11
I am not sure if the IP is same in your case because Bigrock might be using multiple servers to offer this service.
Linode do not offer naked domain ANAME records either. A solution I have found is to add a www.site.com CNAME record for the Heroku app as normal. Then point the naked domain/catch-all A record to the following IP address:
174.129.25.170
This is a free naked domain redirect service offered by wwizer. It will take your naked domain, and simply redirect it to a www. equivalent:
site.com => www.site.com
Hope this helps.
Try adding your domain name with www in the 'Destination' of Domain Forwarding Panel.
Later, remove the A record for www. Hence, there will only be 2 A records
i.e for naked domain and wildcard (*)
Then add a CNAME record for www pointing to the HerokuApp value.
Do let us know if you are facing any issues.
You have to do Domain Forwarding of your site from naked domain to www sub domain. This features available next to Manage DNS feature. Once the dialog open, just enter your www subdomain(www.example.com). After 6 to 8 hours(sometime it take 1 day), It will automatically add an A record for your naked domain(example.com) points to ip 173.193.106.14.
For e.g. kanhaiyakumawat.com and kanhaiyakumawat.herokuapp.com
Here are the steps
Add records in your heroku account for
www.kanhaiyakumawat.com to kanhaiyakumawat.herokuapp.com
kanhaiyakumawat.com to kanhaiyakumawat.herokuapp.com
*.kanhaiyakumawat.com to kanhaiyakumawat.herokuapp.com
So now with this heroku side setup is done. Lets move to bigrock 'DNS Management' section. Click 'Manage DNS'.
Add CNAME Records
www.kanhaiyakumawat.com to kanhaiyakumawat.herokuapp.com
*.kanhaiyakumawat.com to kanhaiyakumawat.herokuapp.com
MOST IMPORTANT: Setting up Naked Domain or root domain Setup
Now this is most trickiest part. Just leave the 'hostname' text box
empty and select 2nd radio button in Values.
Put here your heroku dns value e.g. kanhaiyakumawat.herokuapp.com
Same steps are available here:
http://kanhaiyakumawat.com/blog/heroku-and-bigrock-dns-setup/
I am hosting my app at heroku, my domain is with godaddy. How to point my domain to my heroku app?
Shall I change NameServer 1 and NameServer 2 to myApp.herokuapp.com and myApp.herokuapp.com?
I have followed instructions at heroku, but, I want to make sure that I am on the right way.
You don't change the nameservers, Heroku is not a DNS provider. You leave the domain management wherever you are comfortable with it and edit the records to point at your app on Heroku.
It's detailed more at https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/custom-domains#dns-setup but in summary, if you have a domain foobah.com registered with GoDaddy with would use their control panel (maybe Advanced control panel) to edit the DNS records to point at Heroku. You need to have a CNAME record for www.foobah.com with it's value set to myapp.herokuapp.com. You may find you already have an A record setup for you when you registered the domain or an existing site, you should delete this. You also then need to add the custom domain www.foobah.com to your application on Heroku.
Here is my scenario:
I have an application that will have to support multiple clients. Each client will be given a subdomain for there service. We will also have a brochure website that doesn't have the application, its just a website about the product and how potential clients can setup an account with us.
Given:
www.mycoolsite.com would point to a brochure app on Heroku.
client1.mycoolsite.com, client2.mycoolsite.com and client3.mycoolsite.com would all point to the same SaaS application that could tell the difference between each request and I should be able to handle so they only see their date (i.e. setting a global client_id or something like that)
How do I go about doing this? I haven't done a lot with DNS so I'm pretty clueless about where to start with this.
Thanks.
No sweat. We do that now, at Heroku. We happen to use Godaddy for the domain registrar, but any DNS control panel will let you do the same thing.
The other explanations I read here are a little general, here are the specifics...
The explanation at heroku is very good, at : http://docs.heroku.com/custom-domains
(there's even a very good screencast shows step by step)
the key thing is if your ROOT domain (mycoolsite.com) is at Heroku you want to create THREE "A" records, because they do some fault-tolerant crossover magic. So you'd have an A record for
75.101.163.44
75.101.145.87
174.129.212.2
Now for each subdomain you create a CNAME record
www -> proxy.heroku.com
client1 -> proxy.heroku.com
client2 -> proxy.heroku.com
client3 -> proxy.heroku.com
NOW on the HEROKu side, you have two apps right? The 'brochure app' and the saas app.
Login, and for each app go to Resources -> Addon -> Get More Addons ->Custom Domains (free)
for the brochure app, add ONE domain: www.mycoolsite.com
for the saas app, add each of the clients, eg:
client1.mycoolsite.com
client2.mycoolsite.com
client3.mycoolsite.com
That's it. works like a champ. Have fun.
What you're trying to do is very feasible, and quite easy to do.
You're going to need a combination of A and CNAME records. Simply put, A records map host names to IP addresses, and CNAME records act as aliases for A records.
Let's assume that your SaaS app is hosted at 10.0.0.1 and your Heroku app is at 192.168.0.1, and that you want www.mycoolsite.com and mycoolsite.com to point at the same IP.
(Note: I've never hosted anything at Heroku, so configuring DNS that may be slightly different)
First thing you'll need is an A record for the domain itself. (I've used BIND Zone File Syntax here - hopefully your DNS provider has a much simpler administration system.)
mycoolsite.com. A 192.168.0.1 ; heroku
www CNAME mycoolsite.com ; also heroku
These two records tell us that mycoolsite.com should point at Heroku's IP address, and that www.mycoolsite.com is an alternate name for mycoolsite.com, which will also resolve to Heroku's IP address.
Now, let's set up the DNS for your SaaS site. You could set up an A record for each sub-domain, but if you move servers, you'll have a lot of IP addresses to update. The simplest option is to configure one A record, then point your app's sub-domains at it:
sassapp A 10.0.0.1 ; saas app server canonical name
client1 CNAME sassapp ; alias
client2 CNAME sassapp ; alias
client3 CNAME sassapp ; alias
You can then add as many CNAMEs as you need.
I don't see this being an issue. Rails has had support for subdomains like that in the past with help from gems like subdomain_fu. In Rails 3, subdomain support is actually built in and covered by Ryan Bates http://railscasts.com/episodes/221-subdomains-in-rails-3. Take a look at that screencast for a good direction of where to start.
I believe you'll need the custom domains add-on for Heroku http://docs.heroku.com/custom-domains.
This won't be a problem. For DNS set up an A record for mycoolsite.com pointing to the server where you want your application. Set up an A record for www.mycoolsite.com that is configured for heroku. Now you will also want to redirect traffic that comes in on mycoolsite.com without www and redirect to www.mycoolsite.com, this will keep your top-level domain serving up your brochure app. Once requests are getting to your application you can follow the tutorial that raidfive linked to that will help you through handling subdomains inside of your application.